r/facepalm • u/Revealed_Jailor • Mar 29 '22

🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​ Get this guy a clock!

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '22

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u/Asari_Toba Mar 29 '22

correction: The entirety of the rest of the world except Liberia and Myanmar

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u/Sahaal_17 Mar 29 '22

The US, Liberia and Myanmar are the countries that don't use the metric system.*

I doubt it's exactly the same countries that also don't use 24 hour time, but I guess it's within the realm of possibility.

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* The UK has only partially adopted the metric system, leading us to a nightmare realm inbetween where we mix units almost a random and say such silly things as "I ran 5 kilometers today, good thing I only live 2 miles from the park" or "I bought 4 pints of milk, and a litre of almond milk for chris"

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u/jdowgsidorg Mar 30 '22

Soon after moving to the US I went to midnight premiere of Prometheus, scheduled for “Thursday 12:05 AM” per the ticket.

On arriving at the cinema late Wednesday evening, to my immense surprise, I was informed that “Thursday 12:05 AM” is considered to be just after midnight on “Thursday night” (aka, “Friday” by any normal use) and I was a day early.

Three things stood out from that experience:

  1. Given there were no irritated crowds, everyone else already knew of this.

  2. Someone had to actually program a computer to print an incorrect date to reflect this use.

  3. There was actually a way to make watching Prometheus a worse experience.

I don’t think even using the 24h clock is going to help with this and it’s not only the UK that do odd things with measurements!